An Empirical Study On Learner Autonomy In English Vocabulary Teaching Of Senior High School

Vocabulary is widely accepted as one of the basic elements for language acquisition and the mastery of the vocabulary is an essential aspect of foreign language teaching. One cannot expect to learn a foreign language without the learning of vocabulary. However, in senior high schools, the teaching of English vocabulary does not seem to lead to the expected results. How to teach vocabulary more effectively has drawn the concern of high school English teachers.The thesis aims at exploring a new way of teaching vocabulary which applies learner autonomy in the context of vocabulary teaching for senior high school students. Based on cognitive learning, constructivism and humanism, learner autonomy shifts its emphasis from the teacher-centered to the learner-centered teaching.This research attempts to answer the following questions:1. What is the situation of English vocabulary autonomy learning in senior high school at present?2. Can the vocabulary teaching by the development of learner autonomy benefit the high school students’ vocabulary academic achievement and improve their learner autonomy of vocabulary learning?This research combines the qualitative and quantitative analysis to answer the above questions. It is conducted among students from Jin Yang High School of Liaoning Province,and it lasts for approximately four months. There are 132 subjects in this research, and 67 students are in experimental class, and other 65 students are in control class. Learner autonomy is used to the experimental class, while the traditional vocabulary teaching approach is used in control class. In the experiment, the following research instruments SPSS, questionnaire, two test papers and interviews are used to answer the research questions.The findings from the survey indicate that the overall degree of senior high school students’ learner autonomy of vocabulary stays at a low level. Vocabulary teaching by learner autonomy is not only more effective than the traditional teaching method in improving students’ vocabulary proficiency but also in promoting their capability of learner autonomy in English learning.